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Hi everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no Hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host Laura Shin. Thanks for joining this live stream. Before we get started, a quick reminder. Nothing new here on Unchained is investment advice. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and my guest and I may hold assets discussed on the show. For more disclosures, visit unchained crypto.com quick note before we get into today's episode, Bits and Bits now has its dedicated feed. We're spinning up from the Unchained feed and moving to a new podcast and YouTube channel. So if you want to keep up with our our weekly live streams and macro meets crypto breakdowns, make sure to subscribe to Bits and BIPS directly. We won't publish there until March, but subscribe today so you can be ready for launch. Be sure to subscribe to the new feeds@unchained crypto.com bitsandbps Today's topic is the crypto markets. Here to discuss are Rob Haddock, General Partner at Dragonfly Capital, and Gracie Chen, CEO at bitget. Welcome Robin Gracie thanks for having me.
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B
Laura Hi everyone.
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A
In 2025 we saw FinTech and crypto start to converge on the same competitive space. There's been a few attempts to create an everything app and we're already seeing some of the players maybe pivot away from that while others are continuing in that track. This is a concept that's actually mostly from Asia. WeChat is probably the most commonly cited example of that and meanwhile we are seeing others like Bitget, Robinhood just merging crypto and Tradfi and Bitget is a prime example with its universal exchange. So Gracie, I would love to hear more about the universal exchange and what your vision is for that.
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C
Sure, yeah. In crypto world we are very familiar with the term CEX and Dex centralized exchanges and decentralized exchanges. After FTX collapse there were a lot of a debate on whether there should be more defi trading. Dex and maybe CX have too much power because we are the Custodia platform together with the trading platform and some Users also have their assets on CEXs doing some earning, etc. I think after three years after FTS collapse, things cool down. Definitely people still trust CEX. The UX kind of market share went up about 20% from it was probably like 5 to 10% to where it is today, 20% in terms of a total trading volume market share. But for us emerge or a trend, a few trends that we observed from 2022 until maybe 2025 and that made us want to pivot to UX. The trends being the first one again. Still, Dex is becoming more popular, especially for new tokens. A lot of people realize, you know, CE have a relatively tedious listing process and we do have team, we do have resource. For example, we need to get the market maker ready when we need to list any centralized exchanges token. But still there are only probably 600700 tokens available on CX trading and Biget Binance Coinbase may have slightly smaller range of tokens. And then what. What if people want to trade those tokens who are now listed who are outside of this top 600, 700 tokens. So we embedded our ability from bigger wallet which has already enabled on chain kind of swap and tradings. That means again, Outside of the 600 listed CEX tokens, people can trade them on Dex or decentralized wallets. So we embedded their ability into CEX and have our users be able to trade the decentralized tokens or slightly, you know, much more, much more choices out there. So that's the first trend embedding or integrating CEX experience with the DX options, the DX tokens. The second trend that we saw especially from 2025 is the race of is the rise of RWAs for example, tokenized stocks, tokenized commodity like gold, silver, copper, oil, et cetera. These are becoming more. And it is of course people talk about that for a long for a long time. But it's until 2025 that we see some good players in this space. For example, XOX and Ondo. They both provide tokenized stocks with a relatively comprehensive structure of technology technology structure using Oracles to feed the price and then auditing process every single stocks the underlying there is a specific SPV that holds the real stocks and then they mint and burn the tokens accordingly when the users needed to trade them. So assets or players like this made RWAS and tokenized stocks and commodities more feasible and more popular. So we also partnered with them to enable those assets on our platform. And then of course AI we can chat more on AI. But basically these are the trends that we realize as an exchange ourselves. It's not really accurate to call ourselves just CEX because now we have all those DEX assets and we're not just serving crypto users, we're also serving some sort of like tradfi users or at least users who maybe want to use stablecoin to buy TradFi assets. That's why we think ourselves as CEX is not accurate. And then we pivoted to UX universal exchange universally asset classes. We want to enable our users to trade to be able to trade again universally valuable assets. That includes Forex commodity stocks together with cryptocurrencies. Yeah, so that's a very important strategy we shifted or we came up with in 2025 end of 25 around September in my seven year CEO letter I wrote about UEX for the first and of course along the way we also see some, I would say great minds share great minds alike. Coinbase and Brian Armstrong. Quite everything exchange OKX is also in my opinion leading going to the same direction. NASDAQ last year also mentioned that they want to tokenize their US stocks and enable 245 trading hours. And NYSE this year January mentioned that they want to also to that and enable 247 which is more aggressive in terms of trading hours. So we are all building towards this kind of trading platform that provide RWA assets more tokenized options using blockchain to settle the the transactions and broker the unbrokered. I would, I would call that maybe short in that. Yeah, so that's the, the UEX world that we are building.
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A
And Rob, as an investor in Bitget, you know what interests you about this vision or you know, why do you think this makes sense for the future of Bitget?
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B
Yeah, I mean I think Gracie, she kind of talked about like the high level trends that we're seeing which we're seeing as well. As investors we you know talk to not just you know, all the centralized exchanges but also all the decentralized exchanges as well and the teams behind them. It's very clear when you look at just user behavior right now like users want a place to trade everything. They we're seeing this a lot in the crypto space where people are talking a lot more about trading equities. We're seeing this on things like trade XYZ who obviously has been offered in perps on hyper liquid for real world assets and commodities. We're seeing this and you know a lot of the call it the spot equities as well, so Gracie mentioned things like X stocks, which Kraken acquired. And so there's a lot of demand to be able to trade cross assets, to be able to do complex arc, to be able to do, you know, complex strategies that are only enabled on chain, or maybe being on chain and off chain and having both this X and, and the Dex opportunities like, like Gracie mentioned, but doing it across different types of assets. And so, you know, it makes complete sense that Gracie and team are one of the first to really think through, like, what this could look like. A lot of the competitors are also thinking through, you know, being the everything exchange. But generally in Asia, people have been quicker to adopt, you know, kind of new digital technologies. We've just seen that over time, seen that with payments over time. And you know, Picket's been at the forefront of that. So we're super excited for, for what they're building and we think it's going to be quite interesting to see kind of how this plays out. I do also think the one really interesting piece that is true about being in tokenized equities, tokenized stocks, tokenized commodities and crypto together is that it allows you to serve a global audience in a different way than you can in the current structure of how things work from a regulatory perspective. And because of that, that means that you can bring these really awesome platforms like Bitket has, which primarily might have just been Asian, to a European audience or to a Latin American audience, an African audience, American audience even, and you know, vice versa. You know, Coinbase is going to try to go international as well, but I think historically you've seen that, you know, the, a lot of the Asian exchanges, they understand customers a little bit better than, than the US ones do. And so kind of that convergence and being able to go global provides a really interesting opportunity that just doesn't exist, you know, outside of this space.
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A
Yeah, I was actually going to ask Gracie as my next question. So this is a perfect setup, you know, about Bitget's customer base, because obvious. So it's non us, it's very global. But I'm sure you have certain regions that are more popular. And I was wondering, so first of all, who the traditional customer base is. But then also now that you've rolled out these things like the tokenized stocks and the Forex and all that, if you're seeing that a different type of customer is either coming in for these features or if there's certain geographies or certain types of customers that were existing customers but are now taking up these More tradfi kind of investments.
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C
Yeah, yeah. So big started off seven years ago, seven and a half years ago, which was mainly based in Asia. For that reason, even until today we do have more than half of our users being Asians. East Asia, Southeast Asia, some areas that we see a lot of growth for the past few years. Then I think in 2022, which is exactly the same year when I joined Biget when we started globalization. So since then we have more users coming from the world. Latam, Europe, we see some growth there. In 2022 we did struggle whether we should have a bigger US kind of setting in the United States. But that was still a question around the FTX time. But after that we decided not to go into the US market. We even ended lots of collaborations and development in the US market with for example partners or KOLs. But this year 2026 we are reconsidering entering the US so hopefully there might be some interesting and good news coming up about the specific US market end of this year or later in the first half of 2027. But other than the US we are quite globalized. I would say we serve more than 100 different countries and regions in terms of our users profile. But again Asia is a big base that we have. Then back to your second part of the question around the UEX vision for users. I actually want to clarify because this could be a common misunderstanding that is biggest still a crypto exchange or is biget like directly competing with companies like Robinhood? Or in Asia there's Futu, Momu, that's they're the same company but with different brands of the more local brands versus more global brands but basically some traditional brokers. Are they our direct competitors? I wouldn't agree to that. We are still serving the need of our users who hold stable coin rather than fiat currency. Also when they trade, even if it's traditional financial asset classes, for example US stocks, it is tokenized US stocks rather than direct to US stocks. Because the traditional financial world has been around for what, 400 years. I guess that leads to the first stock exchange in Amsterdam in Netherlands. But for the past, you know, less than less than a century, the financial world isn't evolved a lot. It's still on the quite, you know, T plus 2 kind of settlement period. You need to have a quite tedious process to open an account, etc. In our opinion, we don't want to go back to that old financial system. We think blockchain, just like how stablecoin and Crossbow transactions are much faster and cheaper than traditional cross border transactions. Similarly, the current tokenized stocks and tokenized world, probably liquidity wise we can improve but in terms of the settlement and the technology itself is just faster and cheaper and more advanced. So we're still focusing on the enabling the crypto users. The major difference is they used to use stablecoin e.g. uSDT, USDC to purchase cryptocurrencies on that but now we want them to use stablecoin to trade many other asset classes. But again want to clarify still mainly crypto users and the tokenized version of everything rather than going back to the traditional financial world of settlement, et cetera. And then in 2024 or sorry 2025 and 6 after we rolled out UEX, we did see a slightly structural shift in terms of we have more VIP clients, we have more institutional clients interested in this goal still. Again still crypto users, but many VIP clients, you know, shifted some of their money at other exchanges or even at traditional financial brokers to biget because they can now trade all the different assets in under one umbrella, under one room. And then yeah, it's just like slightly different over there in terms of selling more valued assets, more valued clients and more VIP clients.
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A
I just want to follow up on what you said about entering the US So would you do like a typical kind of create a US entity to do that and then so similar to like a Binance Binance US is type situation. Is that how you would do that?
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C
Well, honestly it's not because it's not what that I don't want to tell you. It's. It's indeed we haven't decided. We're still in the period of of time of acquiring some licenses and talking to our local partners. That's why I estimated this will only be done later, end of this year or earlier in 2027 maybe after a year later. Right now in Q2 and Q1 our key focus in terms of compl and global expansion is actually to get the MICA license and the Dubai VARA license. Actually the Dubai VARA license was supposed to be done in Q1 but given the war in the region, it's definitely delayed to Q2 but for the first half of the year those are the key things. But what I am able to share is that when we are thinking about the US strategy, we don't necessarily plan to do it just by ourselves. We will definitely do it with some partners. Whether it's a joint venture kind of setting or we acquire some partners etc to to build that foundation are both feasible so rather than, you know, ourselves applying all the licenses by ourselves, I think it would take a much longer time, if not a lot of more money as well. But yeah, that's the roughly the current plan.
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A
Okay, so I do also want to ask about one other new feature that is, you know, really tapping into kind of like what's happening in the wider world of crypto, which is you built this AI agent hub and obviously right now everyone's wondering how it is that crypto and AI are going to intersect. It's very clear that this is going to be probably one of the biggest new areas of crypto. So, you know, tell us what the AI Hutch AI agent hub is and you know, what, how it works.
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C
Yeah, you are very updated because we just announced our biget agent hub I think within 24 hours for today. Thank you for doing that. Yeah. So a key thing is we do see AI evolve a lot for the past what, 20, since 2022, end of 2022, when ChatGPT came out, right from the stage of you know, only Chatbot to start with, then to more kind of like protocol, like anthropic MCP and then to more things like Clohub and GPTs that, that provide skills, some domain expert skills and capability modules to where it is now. That's why openclaw is so popular because openclaw has the persistent memory, have the active kind of more active and multi agent collaboration, cross platform collaboration. So in my opinion openclaw is probably the first open source framework that can successfully integrate all these abilities of chatbot, MCP skills, agent, et cetera that can be included into one deployable system. And then we see a lot of potential in that in terms of helping our users make better investment decisions or trading decisions. Because those Open Claw or this kind of operating system, Agent os, we call it Agent OS kind of setting, can really understand our users own portfolio, goals, behavior, habits, etc. So that help them make a better decision. That's one thing we have heavily investing and I would say pretty fast in terms of rolling out our Open Claw platform as well as integrating many abilities to help our users trade better. Another thing is our AI team which was formed earlier last year actually rolled out more than 25 different scenarios within Biget where AI are used. For example customer service translation those are, you know, simple things that you can, anyone can think of, but maybe more subtle kind of applications of AI in terms of a CEX or UEX kind of setting could be know your transaction kyt in order to detect fraud or any potential risk from hack or from sanctioned accounts, etc. Kyt, that's one thing a lot of marketing campaigns that, that they actually just rolled out a Gracie AI a few weeks ago and, and that was just a fun experimental project that AI'd me, put me in, you know, cute avatar and, and they detected, they collected my voice and made an AI voice of mine and some also the whole memory of Gracie was built on my past interviews and my opinions not just for crypto, but also for some personal growth, career advice, etc. Anyway, it's some fun project that we rolled out and then Get Agent is a more serious kind of chatbot that help our users make better trading decisions. All these things that we realize we have accumulated a lot of ability and it's time to share with our clients what all these different AI tools can do. And that's why we put out all the. I think we published 60, 50, 58 tools in nine major different modules to cover the whole trading life cycle in terms of different products like spot products, futures Product copy trading, earn P2P, etc. And using all these different skills that we mentioned earlier, mcp, ap, chatbot, et cetera.
- [22:49]
A
And Rob, I'm sure Dragonfly is looking into this area in a big way. You guys just raised your $650 million fund. Congrats. And I heard Haseeb talking on Bankless about how he thought the unique use case for AI agents that humans can't do is crime. I'm sure you're not investing in that, but talk a little bit about how you think crypto and AI will come together and how you think like bitget or other centralized exchanges are just like existing, you know, crypto entities will begin to adopt more AI.
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B
Yeah, we're definitely not investing in crime, so I appreciate you saying that. So right now it's still very much. It's very early today. Right. And so there's a lot of conversation online about, okay, well, you know, what role will AI and AI agents play relative to, you know, crypto? Whether it's permissionless crypto, whether it's, you know, obviously permissioned it's. Or centralized exchanges, etc. A lot of what Gracie's talking about is, you know, really interesting modular tooling that people can use for trading, which are better than, you know, the things that have existed before, but are not necessarily what I would say, you know, agents in the way that, you know, most of the conversation that we talk about agents, when you can let them go free and you can let them go and kind of Learn and constantly learn and do new things and to be able to potentially see them go in really weird directions as we've seen with things like Mobot and etc. And so where those two will play in the intersection I think is still actually very much up in the air. We've seen a little bit of interesting kind of work around things like decentralized inference and training. A lot of these things have not worked, but we're seeing a little bit of signs of life in a few different parts of the market right now. So far it's definitely, you know, net worse than we're seeing, call it. And you know, our non decentralized counterparts. We've also seen things like, you know, there's vvv, which is, you know, Eric Voorhees project right now, you know, they're doing, you know, sort of a permissionless, you know, sort of, I guess like private wrapper of a lot of the models on top, or you can get access to both, you know, call it the models that you and I maybe use every day, like you know, Claude and Opus and OpenAI, et cetera. But also to some of the like, you know, permissionless models that, you know, don't have the same rules that allow you to do things like, you know, you know, potentially, you know, create, you know, people's likeness that you can do otherwise or something, allow you to do like porn and things like that, which you can't do and you can't do if you use OpenAI. And so we've seen some, you know, kind of this, what I would tell us like cypherpunk ethos in some parts of the market right now really start to pop up. And then of course there's this long conversation around, okay, well, you know, agents will need to pay with stable coins or crypto to be able to do agentic payments. I think there's a, there's a part of the market. Well, that will definitely be true. There's some conversation around microtransactions. But it is also true today that, you know, you can do kind of one time use tokenized credentials and a tokenized credit card and you can bring those costs way down and the networks can kind of sit on top of some sort of like, you know, stablecoin infrastructure. And so where I actually believe, and I actually think Haseeb and I disagree on this. So if he was on this podcast, him and I would start arguing right now. But I actually think what we're going to see a lot of is we're going to See a lot of this, you know, stable coins replace call it the settlement infrastructure for what still exists underneath like a Visa network. And a Visa network will still actually be quite, you know, useful in, in things like agentic payments. And so what there's a lot of these areas where we're seeing a lot of, I would say just, you know, sort of experimentation today. And there's a lot of tooling that can help you be more efficient. It can help you do really interesting stuff on the trading side. But it's really, really early days today. I think Bitget again is, you know, kind of at the forefront of experimenting around this and providing access to their, their customers. And it's going to get a lot better a lot very quickly we're seeing that, that you know, kind of iteration cycle speed up. So that is exciting and I think it's one thing that the markets will tell you right now. If you look at how volatile the equity markets are, look how volatile some of these other the crypto markets are. I think the number one thing that you is being, is being said and being expressed is that nobody actually knows what AI is doing and where we'll be in a year from now or even sooner. So I think it's as exciting time as I need to be playing around and experimenting and trying to be on top of everything that's going on.
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A
Okay, last question that I have about Bitget before we dive into the wider markets is just about the integration with Morph Chain, which is an L2 that has ZK fault proofs. But of course as many L2s have a centralized sequencer. So to start the partnership, Bitcat transferred all of its BGB tokens to morph and 50% were burned immediately and the rest are going to be gradually released for liquidity incentives, you know, other types of initiatives. So Gracie, why don't you tell us why you decided to do this Integration with Morph Chain?
- [28:10]
C
Sure, yeah. Morph Chain, we know the team for a long time. We were initially their investor for I think two, three years ago and, and basically last year when we were navigating our strategy for globalization and probably potentially, It's probably not a secret anymore, but it's also not highlighted that in the upcoming maybe two, three years we are looking for potentially get listed in the US So BGB became a, it was a platform token for a long time, even before I joined the company. But if we have a token on ourselves, it could be a little bit of conflict of interest if we also looking for an IPO plan. So that's part of the reasons that we thought about transferring the ownership of bgb. But even if we transferred all the BGB to Morph, Foundation, Bigger Wallet, and Morph, we are still supporting BGB as ecosystem system providers, especially us, as the. As the exchange where we have a lot of BGB used, scenario for launch pool, Launchpad for VIP users to get a discount, etc. Those things remain unchanged. Yeah, but the key thing is we do want to separate BGB from biget, and we thought holding it to more foundation is a good plan because we know the layer two very early. We are one of the investors and incubators. I think Dragonfly backed them up as well and along the way supported us many of the important decisions we made, including this one.
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A
Okay, so before we dive into, you know, all the things going on in the markets, there's just the last question that I have, which is about, you know, your. Your. You have a big user base in Asia, and obviously Dragonfly investors in both Asia and the West. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about how you think crypto differs between east and west, you know, and. And this question is for either one of you.
- [30:36]
C
Rob, do you want to go ahead?
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B
Yeah, I'm happy to start. I think so. As you mentioned, Laura, you know, Dragonfly, we've got offices in New York and Singapore. We've got teams in on both continents. We've been investing, I think, globally and far more globally than any of our competitors for, call it eight years now. And our perspective has always been, what does this technology do? And I talked a little bit about this. Okay, well, what does tokenized stocks allow? What do tokenized commodities allow? What do these types of products sell? They allow you to go more global. They allow you to meet a global audience wherever they are, and they allow people access to things that they might not have in traditional technology infrastructure exist today in these normal markets. And so our perspective has always been that to understand where crypto is going, you have to understand the end user. The end user today is a global citizen. Right. For a long period of time, most of the end users of crypto were actually much more likely to be Asian than they were to be us, or much more likely to be on that continent than they were to be here. And so our perspective was, when you're going to launch a new protocol, you have to understand that your customer base is going to sit in all of these different countries, and you want to understand their user behavior. And what we see in, especially in Asia, is the customer Base is far more digitally native in some parts of Asia. Alipay has a 98% penetration rate. Right. You do not see that type of digital money, money and that type of comfort with digital money anywhere else in the world.
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C
Right.
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B
You do not. The, how comfortable people in the region are at things like trading different types of asset classes across. I mean, you, you know, like, my mother has never put in a trade in her life, I don't think. And, but the, you know, the moms in Asia are often managing finances that way. Right? They're often managing complex, you know, different types of investments.
- [32:39]
C
Right.
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B
You know, the, the dads are as well. The, the, the whole family is like, it's a, that it's much more ingrained when you think about how people, how people just work through their financial life and how they work through their investing interests. Right. And you just don't see that exist in other parts of the world in the same way en masse. And so that comfort, that focus, that interest means that we've seen higher rates of adoption more quickly across different types of products and asset classes in Asia than you have seen in the US and so when we think through, okay, well, this consumer application, especially on the consumer side, or this defy application, this financial product, we want to go launch it, how does this, you know, application, how does this product, how does it going to resonate in places in Asia as well as the US as well as Europe as well as Latin America? Is it going to be built in a way that can be multilingual, that can be easily understandable, that will appeal to these data different parts of the world? Or is it also true that this is a founder who understands how to reach different types of customers? And that's really important as well. And so these are the types of things that we are focused on when we want to invest. But it's also true that we're seeing a lot of growth now in the US as it's become more acceptable here and as we've seen tailwinds behind the administration and from a regulatory perspective. And so the, the idea is that crypto is really just different across regions in the way that user behavior is different across regions and the customer is different across regions. When you invest, you have to invest with the mindset and the understanding of how those customers behave in these different places of the world and how much adoption has taken place in those different places in the world. So that's the way we like to think.
- [34:28]
A
Through Gracie. What would you say
- [34:33]
C
instead of Gracie? I actually just wrote Out Gracie AI and asked asked my AI the same question like how is crypto users def differ from each other in terms of west and the east side of the market. While Gracie AI said there are a few key differences. First one investment philosophy and time horizon where western users tend to have a longer term investment perspective view crypto more as store value or portfolio diversification while Eastern shows slightly more trading or speculative behavior. Second thing raise appetite leverage use. Third thing asset preference. Fourth regulatory mindset that that Rob also mentioned. Fifth thing community and social influence. I find it interesting that some sometimes I also forget how many interviews I've done in the last four years and how greatly I just collected all those information which I actually agree so to build on Gracie AI shared the real AI Sorry the real Gracie I I would think be before before before crypto sorry when we were only doing crypto the major difference that we saw I very much very much aligned with what Gracia was sharing. For example, some some you know social FI or Tap to Earn kind of gamefi kind of activities were much more active in Asia for example we all know Exo Infinity was highly was a very successful project at that time where users came a lot of most of the users came from Southeast Asia and Tap to earn telegram kind of era the end of 2024 we also saw a lot of users from Asia and even Africa. Tap to earn is relatively easier but of course it's not that popular nowadays especially with the introduction of AI. But basically these kind of trends are quite obvious when we only serve crypto market. But now adding the RWA markets or the universal exchange kind of vision in terms of rwa RWA or Tradfi assets I kind of see at least the users who are trading RWAs for example tokenized stocks whether they come from east or west doesn't make a huge difference. By default our RWA especially tokenized US stocks do attract more Asian users than Western users because Western users probably have already have very good access to some US US based brokers or European based brokers such as Robinhood. But many Asian clients they especially based in East Asia. Some of them have very limited access due to capital control or due to the to it's hard to open an account etc, so they tend to trade a lot of tokenized US stocks with US but but the trading behavior is is a little bit similar in terms of the winner takes it all the M7 stocks or some more ETF kind of stocks like like QQQ are are taking the the major share of those trading probably top 10 tokenized stocks on Biget take about 80% of the total trading volume, although we provide more than 200 stocks to our Euroj owners, for example. Yeah, so. So in terms of the RWA kind of asset classes, I so far we don't see that much kind of difference in west and the east, but when it was only purely crypto users, I would say I agree, generally agree with what Gracie I said. And it's probably a quite comprehensive and thorough coverage of how the two markets can be different.
- [38:46]
A
All right, so in a minute, we're going to dive into what's hitting the crypto markets today. But first, a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. Quick note before we continue with today's episode. Bits and BIPS now has its own dedicated home. We're spinning off from Unchained and launching a standalone podcast and YouTube channel focused on the Fed macro, AI and how it all collides with crypto. If you want to keep up with our weekly live streams and macro meets crypto breakdowns, make sure you're following Bits and bips directly. We won't start publishing until March, but getting set up now means you'll be ready on day one. You can find the new Bits and Bips channels at unchained crypto.com Bits and Bits. You can also find us by searching Bits and Bips on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Back to my conversation with Gracie and Rob. The US and Israel have been engaging in war in Iran for a couple weeks now, and we are now seeing the price of oil just shoot through the roof. And that's because the Strait of Hormuz, which is where a fifth of the world's oil passes, is closed. So, you know, a few days ago we saw oil trading, or about a month ago, we saw it trading at about $70. Earlier today it spiked to past $110 a barrel. And I wondered, you know, do you think that crypto right now is just going to be at the whim of these macro trends, or what do you see affecting the price of crypto?
- [40:12]
B
I don't think there's any doubt that macro is going to continue to play a big role in crypto. Right. And this is true across all risk assets. It's unavoidable that this conflict and Iran and the Middle east is going to continue to drag on risk assets. Generally, there's, I think, a broader conversation around. Okay, well, what is your time horizon and how do you think through the structural backdrop of what is happening in, in crypto. And we talked a lot about this, you know, even through this podcast, which is, you know, stablecoin usage continues to grow very, very quickly and significantly, especially across a lot of institutional use cases. Tokenized equities and tokenized world assets continues to grow. We've seen a, a real excitement around, you know, getting, you know, kind of this regulatory backdrop in, in the west to be more conducive to using, you know, crypto in a bunch of different ways. And we've seen just like mass adoption of tokenized rails for a lot of these fintechs, et cetera. And so when you put all that together and a lot of what Grace has talked about with what Bitget's doing really well, which is bringing this kind of everything exchange to the market and bringing it more global. It's a really exciting time for this space. But in the near term, the Iranian conflict is going to be the most important topic that we continue to talk through. Especially when you think about knock on effects. So, you know, the price of oil, as you mentioned, right? You know, how does that affect, well, you know, relative growth in gdp? How does that affect inflation? How does that affect, you know, the excess capital that, you know, households have the ability to, to continue to invest and you know, consumer sentiment, all of those are going to be negatively affected by, you know, a sustained conflict in the Middle East. I think it's also, you know, it's not just the trade of your museums, as you talked about, Laura, but you know, we're seeing attacks on different oil refineries outside of the Strait of Hormuz. We're seeing 70% of the world's oil comes from the region, even if it doesn't pass through the straight. Right. And so we're going to continue to see concerns there. I think it's also just true that the risk of, you know, call it, you know, like the risk of terrorism has gone up in, in the US as well. You know, based on this we've seen, I think it was the Kansas city Airport, at St. Louis Airport, one of them was, was had a risk of a terrorist attack over the weekend and had to be shut down. Right. These types of things are broadly going to affect the consumer. And so, you know, the shorter that this conflict is, the, you know, more likely that the, that the markets can find their footing. But when you take that into account with a little bit of what we talked about earlier, which is all of this, I think just uncertainty around how AI is going to affect the market and you know, we saw Block, you know, lay off 40% of their, their, of, of their employees and the Citrina report a couple weeks ago and the market sold off quickly the day after. And that thing was literally just like science fiction and you know, but you know, we still see this, a lot of this, you know, discomfort and in, in the markets and so it's a bit of an odd time but I think if you have the right, you know, long term understanding and right long term conviction like both crypto and non crypto risk assets are I think, you know, very have very good backdrops for growth in what is happening in our market, what's happening in AI and what is happening, you know, more broadly in technology. And so I'm excited about the future but it's, it's short term, it's, it's, it's, it's really tough I think to be, you know, really long any sort of asset risk asset right now.
- [43:49]
A
Gracie, what do you think?
- [43:52]
C
Agree. I, I think think right now first of all, I would say the tension in the Middle east actually feels very, very personal to me because we do have an office in Dubai and I've been to all these places that was affected during the war. Bahrain, Dubai, Qatar actually, you name it, just every single country. And then even in Dubai, all the these places that were hit, for example, three months ago I was just walking on Jumeirah beach with my 7 year old son and my mother and we just passed the Fairmont Hotel every day admiring the palm tree and pool. And now the same hotel was hit from the, had a fire at the courtyard because of the debris from the intercepted missile. So the whole kind of instability or geopolitical tension feels extremely real and of course it's impacting the global market. And, and this directly affects how I invest in general because right, right now I would say risk of sentiment and diversification is no longer just a buzzword, it's a necessity. You can't put all your faith in one region or one asset. And, and, and of course for, for us, we are, we are quite convinced should diversify and they should look for different asset classes, not just crypto. And especially Bitcoin is more of a risky asset today than a risk off asset. But also diversify into some other global asset classes including commodity and then back to Bitcoin itself. Sorry, do you have a follow up question, Laura?
- [45:51]
A
No. Well, I was going to ask about Kevin Warsh, but if you want to talk about Bitcoin specifically leap, please do.
- [45:57]
C
Okay. Okay, sure. Yeah, yeah. So, so for Bitcoin itself I would say right now, you know, 60k to 70k kind of price range is actually a good time to do dollar cost averaging. And I do think everyone should have a personal goal for Bitcoin accumulation. You know by, by one Bitcoin if, if they just started off or, or, or 10 or 50 or 100. Although Bitcoin wasn't outper right now I do believe it. Well it is the Millennials digital gold and it is a pure capture or reflection of liquidity. So if, well we'll chat more on Wash but basically if the new Fed in terms of the monetary and physical policy, if we have more QE quantitative easing and the interest rate cut, I think Bitcoin will catch up up with, with gold etc. So I personally believe, still highly believe in Bitcoin's growth trajectory and think it's worth the investment especially if, if you have a relatively long time horizon, three, three to five years, etc. But if you're waiting for Bitcoin to you know, just go up right away, very short term, if you're very impatient, I would say it's probably that will take a little bit time.
- [47:30]
A
Okay. So I hinted at what my next question was going to be but it was about Kevin Warsh and I just wondered how you thought he might handle what the Fed will be doing this year and how you thought that would affect the outlook for the crypto markets.
- [47:48]
C
Honestly I want Rob to cover this question more because I think he knows the US market and he probably have some access us to, to some, some policymakers and, and deeper views than I am for sure. But my, my, my, my, you know, quick three cents would be I feel the market has already priced in the, the fact that Wash is a hawk is a hawk and that, that that's probably the main reason that drove Bitcoin down from where it was 65k to where it is now 60 sorry 95k to 65k. That's a huge drop. Of course when liquidity was pretty weak after 1010 last year, the largest single day liquidation. The any kind of bad news could be pretty bad. But similarly any kind of good news could be pretty good. And the market, it could be quite volatile. But I don't have very strong opinion or anything sort of like insight on the new Fed chairperson other than what the market already knows.
- [49:06]
B
Yeah so I think my take is a little bit, is a little more nuanced which is because I think the market doesn't know what to make of Kevin Morris right now. So he's a To Grace's point, he's like, very clearly a hawk and like, you know, the things that he says and the, the writings that he's put out and the way he's acted before. There was also a lot of conversation is, you know, Warsh was handpicked by President Trump. And I think as all of us can kind of, you know, surmise over the last, you know, two terms of President Trump is with the thing he typically seems to care most about is loyalty and you know, people who really want to try to enact his agenda, very clearly, you know, he's been, I, I, I, my opinion would be, and I think a lot of people would share this, that Jerome Powell has actually done a pretty tremendous job post, you know, 2021 and you know, and kind of managing the ship. The Fed was a little bit late to the, the, the hiking cycle, but it wasn't, you know, it did, it did a pretty good job during that period of time. And yet, you know, President Trump has been out there just lambasting Jerome Powell basically every chance that he gets. And so I think there's something to be said about, well, you know, what has the conversation been like between, you know, Kevin Wash and, and President Trump and how might that affect the way that he actually does action act, you know, going into, you know, post being assuming that he's confirmed. That said, the Iranian conflict like we just talked about has made this a tougher job than it it previously was going to be, especially if this sustains. And we, I think I saw over the weekend that Goldman is expecting, based on how long this goes on, that the inflation will go up from 2.4% to 3% annualized. It's, if this goes on for longer and oil continues to be constrained, inflation will go even higher. Or, and if that happens, then it becomes significantly harder for, for Kevin Wash and, or any sort of Fed chair to, to decide to, to cut rates. And so I think it's very, it's very uncertain right now on what exactly will happen. I would lean more towards the path that they're, you know, Kevin Warsh will want to work with the administration more than Jerome Powell wanted to and, but what that would probably entail would be more likelihood of a cut cycle. That said, now with what's happened in Iran, I can't be confident what that will look like.
- [51:46]
A
All right, so I did also want to ask. We've been alluding to this throughout the conversation and I'm sure we all know that there's so many theories about this on Twitter lots of podcasts about this. But the market market, you know in crypto hasn't been quite the same ever since 1010 and I wondered if you had thoughts on kind of like what broke that day or do you think it was just the typical four year cycle and we're going to you know, be in a bear market for a while. You know I'm hearing other people say that they really think that this will be the year that proves that the four year cycle is dead. So yeah curious for I guess your thoughts on was it really 1010 and if so then what will kind of fix things or what happened or is it it just the typical cycle
- [52:32]
C
I'll start since since 1010 kind of has a lot of issue to do with one of the CEX especially the technical glitch there. So in terms of 1010 what HAP. What happened exactly? We we kind of all know already it was triggered by a sudden macroeconomic event when Trump mentioned that that he will start a new trade war with China. Although that kind of cooled down later. But then the, the. The technical glitch that happened mainly on Binance caused a lot of issue when doing by the way it was also a liquidity vacuum I would call because it was I think in Asia Saturday morning and then the US market is also closed. So the the whole liquidity is very weak and it's mainly reflected on crypto since 20 crypto is a 247 market that was one of the major asset classes that was still open and then a lot of high leverage in in CEX or in in certain defi protocols went wrong especially I would highlight USDE but USDE was mainly having liquidity on sorry the so called deep hagging on Binance rather than Defi platform I think has twitted a lot on that clarification which I totally agree but other than USDE there were some WBE or BNSO which are wrapped version of Solana and Ethereum that were highly depict from the original asset Solana or Ethereum Ethereum and that caused some some more liquidity and then all coins were down. So so that was probably the the. The main things that happened on 1010 or 1011 depends on your time zone but I would call it a series of things that triggered together triggered by the macroeconomic event together with the high leverage structure, liquidity vacuum, technical glitch, uncertain CEX etc. So it's not just some like one thing happened. But yes the whole world looks very different from after 10:10.
- [55:01]
B
I think maybe the high level point to make, which is everything Grace said is true. There's I guess two points to make. First is I think on a more micro perspective just how much it matters to be able to do appropriate risk management and to think through how, you know, your Oracle setup, what that looks like and you know, make sure that you're able to, to appropriately redeem different types of wrapped assets and bring them on platform and et cetera. And so we've seen obviously there was some infrastructure and risk management issues at some of these places as Gracie mentioned. I think the higher level point to make and the fact that we look so different today than we did before then is it's not clear to a lot of people from the outside in, in. But 2025 was an awful year for the consumer in crypto. It was the. We've probably never seen so much capital lost by the traditional consumer in a year as we had as in 2025 at a time when we saw institutional adoption picking up and we saw stablecoin adoption picking up, when there was a lot of excitement around, you know, what was happening, you know, in the space in terms of allowing it to enter the US market between, you know, what happened with the Trump of Melania meme Coin, what happened with the liquidations around the tariff tantrum and then what happened on 10 10. We saw more capital liquidated last year than we had seen basically in the entirety of crypto before. And so it's been, it's really hard to go to a consumer and say, hey, we know that you've lost a bunch of money, money, you know, in derivative products on, on this, in this space. But you know, you need to trust us and come back and to continue to invest. And so we have to as an industry do a good job of, you know, explaining why people should continue to invest in this space. And this is obviously a trading point versus like hey, I have like a long term buy and hold perspective on like what you know, bitcoin accumulation means and the dollar to basically placement story and, and digital gold. And we need to continue to make those points. But when the consumer loses money, they don't come back. And you know, you see there, that's the thing that we have to think through around how do we get, provide value to the consumer that isn't just, you know, trading capital that may or may not get, you know, have them lose money over time. And you know, I think this is something we've seen like Robinhood do really well. Right. Which is a lot of the criticism of Robinhood for many many years years was hey, like this is just a, you know, gamifying, you know gambling, right. Or speculation. Right. And you know something like 70 of options traded today are zero day options. A lot of that is these retail bases in places like Robinhood which are more speculative products. But what have they done as done well outside of that is they provided you know, a really broad set of now wealth management products and spending products for consumers that know now see Robin Hood as a place for their call it financial future. And now they can invest in across different asset classes. Right. That gets back to how this podcast started which is, you know, what is Bitget doing when they're, they're launching their kind of unified exchange is they're providing universal exchange. Universal exchange. They, that they're allowed to, they're able to do all of these different things that affect their financial lives and that are allowed that are providing value to them. And so I think that we have to continue as an industry industry to focus on that versus just like the speculative trading products.
- [58:36]
A
So earlier we also talked about Bitcut's new AI agent hub and given the state of the markets, and I agree with you Rob, that when you have $19 billion in liquidations, people literally don't even have the money to come back in. So that might just be what's also going on in crypto. But when I look at the AI agent thing, that's kind of the one area where I'm like, well that could pick up because I've heard Gracie talk about before how she thinks altcoins are just dead. Like she doesn't think there's going to be an altcoin season coming. And so you know that typical trend that we would see of altcoins kind of having their season after the majors take off, like it didn't happen this cycle, it may not happen again, I don't know. But when I look at the AI agent thing, that is kind of the one area where I'm like, well the, this, this is clearly something new that's blossoming in crypto. You know, I don't know. Do you think that we might see that materially impact the markets at any time soon? And if so like in what way?
- [59:39]
C
Okay, I just quickly build on what Laura mentioned around my very bold statement about altcoins are debt. Yeah, of course it sounds a little bit extreme. Especially as a CEO of one of the largest UX or CEX crypto or altcoins are, are the foundation of our business saying their debt is a little Bit too much I would say. But, but my point is in general investing in altcoins, it's on average, on average it's harder to outperform bitcoin. Still, there will be a lot of altcoins that has growth opportunities. They are seriously building on something. Dragonfly should make a lot of investment into those space as well. And then in terms of AI plus crypto kind of altcoins, I do struggle with this. Actually a year ago I made a prediction in January that with the development of AI that those AI altcoins could be a growth sector and even could be the only growth sector. I was only half right about that. AI is growing very, very fast, but the AI altcoins are not. If we compare, for example coin gecko, AI sector, kind of all the altcoins market cap, it's only half at end of the year than the beginning of the year in 2025. So that kind of ties back back to when I said altcoins are dead. It's very hard for, for altcoins to to grow in terms of, in terms of the market share. Bitcoin is becoming more and more dominant. If you look at the total total market cap. And then there are so many altcoins coming up every day, especially with platforms like Pomfong, it's so easy to issuan token an altcoin token. So with the market total size being same or even shrinking since bitcoin is more dominating investitution, so institutional kind of adoption only go to the major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, the market of altcoins is shrinking, but the quantity of the altcoins is growing. So each individual altcoins just by mathematics itself should be shrinking. And that's what I mean by altcoins are dead or it's harder to invest. But now with AI, I think again nobody will doubt the trend of AI. But I still doubt the trend of AI tokens or AI altcoins. Whether first of all many very good AI products like OpenClaw, like OpenAI, they are not issuing a token. And then many so called AI projects or AI altcoins are not really doing a good job in terms of providing their AI services. So that's what I struggle and I still remain very relatively negative towards that sector. But one sector that I am optimistic is we touched upon that earlier in terms of how AI agents kind of communication and growth can enable more cross agent transfer using stable coins or using cryptocurrency. So that is a sector that I'm Optimistic. But if we're talking about some, you know, some project that claims that they're building AI, the AI tool, AI agent, to me, many of them look more like just a meme coin, just an AI meme. Sorry if this kind of provokes some, some arguments around our coins, around some projects who are really building. I, I do again, again think that many good projects who are seriously building, but it's just harder and harder to find them.
- [63:41]
B
About the only thing I would add is I don't think all coins are dead as a, as a rule. What I do think is true is that there more than ever there needs to be some story around why a token needs to exist, how it accrues value, and is this a protocol that's, you know, or a token attached to a protocol that's actually, you know, worth owning over time? There's, you know, for a long period of time and we've seen this in traditional markets. There's, you know, you shareholders care about, how do you return capital? Is there dividends? Are there, you know, buybacks? Like, what does that look like in terms of, you know, creating excess value for, you know, that shareholder? What ownership do I have of this company or over time? And I, I think it's very important that we get some version of a market structure bill that allows for more innovation chain at the token economic level and the token structure level which allows investors to feel better about what they're actually buying. And this has really been underpinned, I think, by the fact that you've seen a couple of these M A transactions, Circle buying Axelar and the, I think it was Coinbase who bought the, the vector.fund team or Tensor team, where there was some capital that went to equity holders into the team, but the token holders, holders basically got nothing. And that really underpins this idea that some of these tokens exist maybe just as meme coins attached to maybe a really good business or product, but the tokens themselves just are meme coins. And so what we want to see is we want to continue to see more innovation at that kind of token structure level. I think when you see that, you'll see people more excited about owning certain types of tokens and certain types of markets. And we're going to continue to see dispersion across, you know, the way some of these different tokens, you know, accrue value or not and what performs well or not. In 21 and 22, you used to see everything go up and everything go down together. That the sign of a maturing market is that that is no longer happening, that now that there is actual dispersion between the things that work and the things that don't. And so that's a good thing for us, even though I think it makes it harder than ever to invest in the space.
- [65:57]
A
All right. Well, it has been so fun chatting with you both. Thank you both so much for coming on on Chained.
- [66:03]
B
Thanks, Laura.
- [66:04]
C
Thank you.